Answerless
by SamCyberCat
Summary: Mai left because she wasn't ready to confront her feelings for Joey and Valon. They followed her because they were boys and didn't think things through, apparently. Joey/Mai/Valon. Dubfic.


Notes – Written for the polyship Gift Exchange Mini-Fest for demoerin. Set post-canon. A dubfic, but references Mai and Vivian's appearance together from the ending of the Japanese series, which I hope will be okay.

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Some girls probably had easy love triangles.

Well, that in itself was a lie. The whole concept of a love triangle was that there were three people who had some sort of feelings for each other and someone or everyone was going to get hurt by those feelings, but Mai still felt that some girls had it easier than her.

For example, she would have liked to have been able to drive off into the sunset and think her life through peacefully before making a decision about what to do. She would have liked all the time in the world, and in honesty she hadn't even started thinking about going back. Or what she would say to either of those two boys who had affected her life so greatly with their affections if she did go back.

In short, she hadn't made up her mind.

But if she'd been given enough time she might have been able to do so. However, the day she opened her door to find one very determined Joey and one equally determined Valon standing there she realized that any time she had was up.

In retrospect appearing on TV to duel as Vivian's tag partner might not have been the best idea when it came to keeping her location secret.

She looked from one to the other. If it had been either of them on their own she'd probably have been able to deal with it, but again, that would have been too easy. It had been a long time since she'd had to deal with them both together, and her experience of that tended to result in fighting or souls being removed. Sometimes both.

After a few moments she concluded that they weren't going to disappear into thin air and said, "You'd better both come in then."

She led them through without a backwards glance, easily able to picture them looking around the room with curiosity. It wasn't as if the place was a dump, but Mai hadn't devoted much time to cleaning it up. She spent more time travelling then she did at home, so this house was essentially a rented building where she sometimes rested her head.

Once they'd reached the living room she spun around to face them, saying, "So, you found me. Congratulations."

Neither of them looked as if they knew how to respond. Typical boys, run in all guns blazing but have no plan for what came next.

"So, what do you plan to do now you're here?" she prompted.

"We deserve some answers at least," Valon said defensively.

"Then you're going to be disappointed because I have none for you," she growled, "If you'd given me some more time then perhaps, but-"

"How long more? Another year? Or just whenever we accidentally crossed paths again?" Joey cut in, "You could have at least said goodbye, Mai."

"You'd have talked me into staying," she reasoned.

"You gave him a card," Joey retorted, gesturing towards Valon.

"He was unconscious, so he was hardly going to reason with me. And how do you know about that card?" she replied.

Valon answered that one, "Came across him while I was driving here. The idiot was walking so I gave him a lift. We talked a bit on the way."

"How very charitable of you," Mai answered sarcastically.

So now they were both working together. Wonderful. She thought that she might have preferred it when they were at each others throats.

"And how did you even find out where I was?" she asked.

"Vivian told me."

"Same here."

She was going to murder Vivian when she next saw her.

"And you couldn't just get on with your lives and leave me be?" Mai said.

"No, because…" Joey started.

Don't say it, please don't say it, she silently begged.

"…I love you, Mai."

He said it.

"And as much as I hate to admit it, so does this guy here. So we deserve to know one way or another about how you feel so we can pick our lives back up and carry on."

She let out a deep sigh.

"I don't know how I feel," she replied, "Don't think I've put off thinking about you two, because it keeps me awake long into the morning and no matter what choice I try to come up with someone always ends up getting hurt. You're both such dumb, determined guys, and heck, you both deserve a girl that loves you, but for whatever reason you're going after me."

"Because I don't want to be with anyone else," Valon said.

She felt sorry for him, she really did. He knew all about her past with Joey, he knew that he was a late-comer who probably had no chance, but he pursued her regardless. He'd helped her when she was in such a dark part of her life and he'd altered his own lonely traveler persona because he wanted to travel with her, another lonely traveler. Together, he had probably hoped, they would take away each other's loneliness. After what happened he knew that she'd probably toss him a side, but he'd come here anyway.

And then there was Joey. What could she do with Joey? That guy had been the person who made her rethink her life. She'd have gone on quite happily scamming people if he hadn't made her look at herself and realize that she didn't want to be alone. By a side effect of that he was the reason she'd truly felt alone for the first time, but he had put his everything into trying to rescue her. Without him she'd probably still be a mindless sacrifice for Dartz.

It wasn't fair on either of them.

Leaving them for a moment to stand awkwardly in silence, she finally said, "If you're both going to stay you might as well make yourselves useful and help me set this place up. I'd only prepared dinner for one."

That was how it started.

Ignoring all the pent up anger at their situation that the two might have felt they, helped Mai. Possible because they both knew she couldn't come up with an answer on the spot, or maybe it was because each wanted to look like the most helpful guy in her eyes, but whatever the reason they got on with it.

When night came she walked into her room, leaving them with a harsh remark that they could fight over the sofa. It was more than a bit insensitive, she knew, but they needed to know that she wasn't happy with what they had done.

By the next morning she found them both lying half-on-half-off the sofa in a tangle of limbs. It was typical boy behavior, but she couldn't stop herself from smiling at the sight. They never knew that though, by the time they woke up she had busied herself with getting ready for the day.

Life came first, love triangles came second.

So she went on with her life, going by her daily routine and not giving them any answers. In response to that they didn't leave. She was a little annoyed that neither of them offered to go stay in a hotel or something similar but at the same time she was glad of the company. It had been a while since her current dueling partner Vivian had come to visit and since Joey had gone to the effort of teaching her loneliness she might as well put it to use.

At the end of the first week they were still there and she was still refusing to make a statement on the point.

By the second week she was asking Joey what his friends made of him being here, to which he infuriatingly responded by cryptically saying he had to spread his wings sometime. In light of her not giving them answers, Valon seemed to support Joey's notion of not telling Mai about his situation, furthering her suspicions that they were working together against her.

With the dawn of the third week she was clearing out the spare room for them.

She stopped being angry with them sometime during the fourth week.

Unbelievably, they'd both found jobs by the fifth week and had offered to help pay the rent on the house. There went her plans of throwing them out on the grounds of being free loaders.

The sixth week and… by the sixth week she stopped counting the weeks. There wasn't much point to it anymore. They had become something of a regular fixture in her life. Much to her relief they'd even stopped looking up at her in the helpless want of answers when she entered a room now as well.

They greeted her like she was part of their family, which was ironic considering all of them, by choice or circumstance, had rejected their own families. They even started treating each other in the same way, such a huge difference from when they'd first met.

It seemed they had grown up.

If only she could do the same…

They would have told her she had if she brought the subject up, and she knew it. But she would never say something like that to either of them. She was a big girl and had to look after herself, as she always had.

Mai was simply lending some of the looking after responsibilities to them, allowing them to do things that she wouldn't have considered doing otherwise. Such as letting Joey pick out a movie that was so moronic they could talk all the way through it without missing out on anything important. Or letting Valon do the cooking, which he was surprisingly good at.

He'd had to look after himself for a long time but she'd never really considered what that entailed. Most of her cooking before him coming along had involved poking holes in a plastic covering and microwaving the contents to roughly the time it had said on the packet. But he bothered to cook food that took more than ten minutes to make.

Joey, on the other hand, wasn't allowed to cook at all. The smoke alarm had firmly insisted on that.

Somehow, in spite of what the universe had thrown at the three of them, they were working together.

One day she'd have to give them an answer, and she knew that.

But as Valon and Joey rested their sleeping heads on either side of her, leaving her to watch the cheapest zombie movie they had rented so far, she decided that day would not be today.

And maybe it wouldn't be any days in the next year either.


End file.
